DMCA Notices Sent to Google Double in a Year

The search giant somehow manages to cope with a continuous increase of DMCA notices from the rights owners who request to remove links to pirate websites from Google search results. Google currently processes 24 million links per week, which is at least double the amount it received a year ago.

Takedown requests sent by the copyright holders and their representatives have increased dramatically over the years: for example, 5 years ago Google received only 10m takedown requests per year, while today it processes the same amount in less than 3 days.

According to Google’s Transparency Report, a new weekly record was 24m+ reported pirate links, which is more than double the number received in 2015. It is expected that at the current rate, the search engine will process over a billion links this year, which would be a 100-fold increase in just 5 years.

However, you may remember frequent reports about errors made by the copyright owners, so it is unknown how many of all the reported links will actually disappear from search results. The statistics shows that 91% of the URLs are ultimately removed, 2% of the reported links are rejected, and the remainder is duplicate or incomplete links.

Even despite the ever growing volume of takedown requests, the entertainment industry is still not happy with the Google’s takedown process. It always complains that removed content often reappears under new URLs, and therefore copyright owners have to send new requests to take down the very same links they took down the day before. In order to counter this “Groundhog Day”, they would like the search engine to ensure that content “stays down” by entirely blocking key pirate websites from search results.

In response, Google rejects, saying that it may lead to all sorts of problems, and continues to insist that the current system is working as the DMCA was actually intended. It must be admitted that Google implemented many other innovations to counter piracy – for example, downranking the pirate websites and promoting legitimate options in its search results. This procedure was recently detailed in the company’s updated “How Google Fights Piracy” report.